I’ve been busy with everything but gaming for the last few months, but lately I’ve found some time to play. In part, this was sparked by a long time non-gamer friend picking up Skyrim and becoming engrossed. We planned a Skyrim weekend because everyone at Gamenight now had an interest in Skyrim (I’ll post more about Gamenight some other time).

In preparation for Dovahfest*, I was trying to take his save file and move it to a new account so we could play simultaneously. I set everything up (took over his gamertag since I earned most of the 16,000 gamerscore, got his old gamertag on a new live account, etc.) before learning that saves are owned by accounts, and I couldn’t play the old save on the new account.

I went looking for an answer on Youtube, and it told me that it could be done with a program called Modio, a USB flash drive 1gb or bigger, and a spare save file. Here’s how I did it:

1. Copied the save I wanted to move from the old account “x100tacks” to a 1gb flash drive. (the 360 will prompt you to format the drive before you use it.)
2. Created a new save for Skyrim on the new account “Northsided” on the same 1gb flash drive.
3. Used Modio to do the following:
1. Open both saves in two separate tabs
2. Paste the profile ID from the new account save to the old account save
3. Save the old account save to the new account save folder
4. Re-insert the flash drive in the Xbox and check that the old save now shows the new account name
5. Copy the file I modified to the hard drive and loaded the game.
6. Celebrated my victory.

There’s a lot of other shenanigans you can do with Modio, but I stuck to what i needed to get done. Of course, messing about with save file means you can corrupt it. I copied files instead of moving them for this reason, in case something went horribly wrong. Modio makes it pretty simple, but stay sharp!

*speculative title for our weekend